There are many self help books and articles about the power of the mind and how, if you believe in something, you can achieve it.  This is all good advice but doing it is a little more complex then just telling yourself that you can do something and it will happen.

Part one – Believe!

First, you have to really believe in something not just want something.  You have to ingrain your belief in your mind and picture the outcome as vividly as possible.  In order to make it stick, do the following:

1. Write notes about what you want to achieve and put them all over your home, at your desk, near your computer, on the bathroom mirror and anywhere you will see them and be reminded of it.
2. Tell others what you are trying to achieve and create your own support group.
3. Seek out others who have achieved what you want to achieve and use their success
4. Repeat what you want to achieve to yourself constantly.
5. Be specific on what you want to achieve.  If you want to be a long distance runner, believe that you can run the 26 mile Chicago marathon.
6. Picture yourself as if you have achieved what you believe.

Part two – take massive action!

What the self help books often leave out is, you have to take massive action to make what you believe in come true.  Truly believing in something is a huge first step but if you do not take action, it won’t happen.

For example, if you sit on the couch day after day and tell yourself that you are going to be a long distance runner, you still need to go out and run.  You have to take the action, put in the time and run the miles to achieve what you believe.  Picturing yourself running the 26 mile Chicago marathon, feeling the sun and wind on your face, seeing the terrain that you running on and visualizing the miles clicking up on your pedometer will go a long way to helping you achieve what you believe but you have to actually still run those miles.

Achieving something important to you is not going to be easy but believing that you can achieve it and then taking the action to achieve it has been done by others and it can be done by you too.

Believe it + action = Achieve it!

Give it a try and let me know if you achieve what you believe.

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We follow this path and at retirement age or worse on our deathbed and realize that if we had taken some risks, life might have been better.  Maybe you should start a business, take that job that pays less but you love to do or take up that hobby that you always wanted to do since you were a kid but everyone said you couldn’t do.

Many people think that getting that diploma and working a fulltime job will make us safe.  What we don’t understand is we are still taking risks but with someone else in control.  If we work for someone, that person is taking risks and passing those same risks along to us.  If they fail and go out of business, we are out of work too but without the security that a good business owner should have prepared for when the business was doing well.

Many people continue to do work that they dislike even though, deep down, they know that they would be so much happier if they did what they loved for less money.  Day after day, they dread waking up to travel to work, spend eight miserable, exhausting hours working in job that they despise.  I understand that people have responsibilities, families to support and bills to pay but if you turn in the BMW for a Chevy or cut back from one or two Starbucks drinks a day to two each week, you might be able to find ways to afford the lower income.  You are still taking a risk but the feeling you get by doing work you love could lead you to better opportunities, both personal and monetary, that you and others may think are not possible at the moment.

Many people never try to learn something new, like playing guitar, learning Karate, learning to paint or many other things because others tell us it’s too risky and we might get hurt or not do well at it.  I was 38 years old when I started learning Karate.  I had many people tell me that I was too old, could get hurt badly and that I was just plain crazy for doing it.  Needless to say, in just under six years, I became a black belt, I was helping teach only three years after I started training and have changed mine along with a few other peoples lives over the past seven years since I started.  Did I take risks, yes.  Is my life better now than it was before I started, YES!  All because I took a risk and had it pay off big for me.

There are always risks involved when doing our own thing, but if we believe that it can be done, the risks get smaller and our chance for success gets bigger.  With that in mind, take some risks now before it’s too late!

Have any of you taken risks that paid off big for you?  Please leave a comment and share your success with us.

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There are many rules that writers and bloggers are “supposed” to follow and one of those rules is “do not write a blog post with less than 300 words.”

If you have something important or useful to say and you can say it in a few words, just say (or type) it.

One excellent example of short blog posts is Seth Godin.  Some of his most popular posts are very short, some less than 75 words but also very popular and remarkable to say the least.

There are a lot of one or two line sayings that have had an impact or changed our lives and maybe, that one or two line post of yours will change the life of someone too.  Stop worrying about your word count and write what you want to say even if it is only a few lines long.

Don’t be afraid to break the rules of blogging because those rules were put in place by bloggers just like us.

Please leave me a comment and let me know if you do this and what results you have seen.

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1. Like Xerox is to copy machines, Google is to search and bloggeries is to blog posts?

Meditate here.

For many years, I wanted to learn how to meditate. There are many possible benefits to mediation including helping you relax, reducing stress, improving mental focus and even some new evidence that suggests there are physical benefits as well.

I purchased CD’s, listened to online courses and was even considering traveling to a monastery to learn how to meditate but I always came up with the same excuse, I don’t have the time.

After some time, I found that I was able to meditate for short periods of time. Maybe a couple minutes here and five minutes there but I have never been as consistent as I wanted to be.

Just recently, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits fame posted a very simple article called “How to Meditate Daily” on his website. He outlines a very simple plan on how to start small and work your way up while creating a lasting habit that you will continue to do every day.

One of the key takeaways that I received from his article was you only need to start with 2 minutes a day. I do not know anyone who cannot spare just 2 minutes a day to try something that could offer so many possible benefits. After you get in the habit of meditating for minutes each day, you then try to increase that time to 5 – 7 minutes, even though I think a total of 3 minutes would be acceptable, after 7 days. After that becomes habit, you increase your time but the key is to get started and do it every day.

I have been doing this for a few days, in the morning and it seems to be helping me focus better.  I plan on doing this meditation a few times a day going forward but I am starting small and am happy with once a day for now.

Give Leo’s article a read and leave a comment here to let me know if it works for you or what you think about it.

Photo: taken by Doug at the Chicago Botanic Garden a few years ago.

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If you answered yes to any or all of those questions, it’s time to make a change.  We humans are creatures of habit.  Many of us, like robots, get up each day, go to work, come home and look at the television or computer, go to sleep and then repeat the next day.

The problem is, we all have dreams of being wealthy, healthy, having more time to enjoy ourselves, great relationships and the list goes on and on.  The problem is, we do the same thing each day and still get the same results and end up no closer to our dreams.  Hoping that things will get better or fall in our lap is not going to help.

If you are not happy with the same results, change….

The key to getting what you want is doing things to get you there, not the same things that aren’t getting you there.  For example;

You want less debt but you purchase every new gadget that comes to market.  If you continue to spend money, that you do not have on gadgets, you will only keep or increase your debt.  In simple terms, what you have been doing (spending money on gadgets) is getting you the same result (more debt).

Until you change what you have been doing, you will continue to get the same results.  If you are unhappy with your current results, do something different and make your results different too!

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